There are some things that non-programmers wouldn’t understand. Just like in many professions and hobbies, certain bits of inside knowledge and jokes might confuse outsiders. Such might be the case with the "spaces vs tabs" debate among many coders. Some use spaces when they're coding; others use tabs, but there's an interesting statistic.
Those programmers who use spaces earn more than those who use tabs. According to the Stack Overflow 2017 Developer Survey, developers who use spaces had a median yearly salary of $59,140, while their peers who used tabs earned a median of $43,750.
If you’re a programmer who uses tabs, don’t feel like you have to switch to spaces. Although correlation doesn’t always mean causation, there are a few theories exploring why space users earn more than tab users.
Data scientist Dave Robinson theorized that it’s simply because more variables coincide with space or tab preference. For example, developers working in lower-GDP-per-capita countries tend to use tabs more often and have lower salaries on average. Programming language also matters: mobile developers are more likely to use tabs, while DevOps developers prefer spaces, and mobile developers tend to earn less than DevOps engineers.
Clean code is a mark of a good developer and a daily aspiration for every programmer. Ironically, programmers don’t spend as much time writing code as they do reading old code and fixing mistakes. We already mentioned that developers spend about half of their workday spotting and fixing mistakes, but it might be shocking how little typing a programmer usually does.
Like Robert C. Martin, aka Uncle Bob, wrote in Clean Code, “the ratio of time spent reading versus writing is well over 10 to 1. We are constantly reading old code as part of the effort to write new code. …[Therefore,] making it easy to read makes it easier to write.”
Still, that doesn’t mean that programmers don’t need energy. Judging by their caffeine consumption habits, they need a lot of it. As someone who grew up with two gamer brothers, I know a thing or two about excessive energy drink consumption. It seems that programmers have a similar dependency on caffeine: in 2024, 83.6% of programmers in the U.S. reported drinking coffee daily.
Programmers also have a strong affinity for dark mode, as 64% of respondents in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024 said they prefer to work in dark mode. Granted, others do too: 81.9% of mobile users choose dark mode for daily use. It's been proven that using dark mode reduces eye strain, saves your device's battery, and helps your eyes focus faster — we see bright accents on dark backgrounds two or three times faster than the same accents on white.
What do you think of this selection of memes from r/ProgrammerHumor, Pandas? Let us know your thoughts about tabs vs. spaces and dark mode in the comments! And while you're here, check out our previous publication featuring the best-of-all-time memes and jokes from the subreddit, and test your knowledge about statistics and data science with a collection of these memes for statisticians!
